Case study: Columbus sails on wireless apps

By Johanna Ambrosio

05/01/2005

Once Columbus Children’s Hospital rolled out its mobile access project,
demand from end users accelerated its deployment. The initial roll out of 130
users was followed up with another 170 in the first year. In the next 18 months,
that number will likely double again to 600 users.

“At first, word got out slowly, and that took us through the first six
months,” says Schon Crouse, mobility support analyst at the hospital.
“But then people started hearing about what others were doing, and people
began coming to us more and more.”

The hospital had to develop guidelines for the job descriptions that would
have mobile access—primarily those dealing with visiting patients or in
groups including transport, which is on the road constantly. “We’ve
had to tell some managers that we need justification,” he says. “That
slows them down a little bit.”

At Columbus Children’s Hospital, the mobile effort has been about providing
better patient care. Some 300 people in 14 different groups are using mobile
devices for everything from keeping tabs on the physician residents to pushing
information to different constituencies. “What’s great is I can
create an image for each group, with specific needs for software, and I can
push this image out to the users in each group,” Crouse explains.

The basic idea behind much of this is to push out information in mobile form.
This includes a book of drug formulations and interactions, specially created
for Children’s Hospital and updated every three months. Users have the
ability to print via an infrared port off the PalmPilot.

Another application is a medical calculator which determines things like drip
rates for various medicines given intravenously.

In addition to making more people productive, Crouse says his Extended Systems
software helps him be more proactive. “It runs a report anytime someone
syncs, and if the person is having trouble, I can see what the error is and
shoot the user an e-mail to help solve the problem.” Say, for instance,
the password on the PC changes, which it does every three months, Crouse can
remind users to update their passwords even before they run into access problems.

Client devices used at Children’s include PalmPCs, Pocket PCs and Smart
Palms with integrated phones.